merging two blogs

Forum Rules

Helios_Multi TPoxygen11final

[goatlady]

Two of my blogs are technical web dev sites - one is about ColdFusion programming and the other about web standards, accessibility, usability etc.

I originally started the standards one because I was writing a lot about that and those posts weren't relevant to the sites that were aggregating my ColdFusion blog. These days however, I don't have a lot to talk about on the standards blog, and the things that I do post about are quite relevant to my ColdFusion blog. The ColdFusion aggregator sites are more open to general web development and standards now too - one is even aggregating both blogs. So I'm thinking that maybe the best thing to do would be to merge them. It would make my life easier and get rid of some of the guilt I feel at neglecting poor zombiecoder

I was thinking I could import the posts and comments quite easily because they're both wordpress, and then do a wildcard redirect from one domain to the other (the archives format is ever so slightly different so there'd need to be a bit of regular expressions hackery but nothing too major). So none of the links would be lost or broken. Blog about it to explain perhaps. Maybe if I could work out some way of detecting when someone has come from the old domain I could display an explanation message or something.

Has anyone done anything like this before? Got any ideas about how it might be done better or anything I've missed? Does anyone think it's a terrible idea?

[FormerAdmin]

Two of my blogs are technical web dev sites - one is about ColdFusion programming and the other about web standards, accessibility, usability etc.

I originally started the standards one because I was writing a lot about that and those posts weren't relevant to the sites that were aggregating my ColdFusion blog. These days however, I don't have a lot to talk about on the standards blog, and the things that I do post about are quite relevant to my ColdFusion blog. The ColdFusion aggregator sites are more open to general web development and standards now too - one is even aggregating both blogs. So I'm thinking that maybe the best thing to do would be to merge them. It would make my life easier and get rid of some of the guilt I feel at neglecting poor zombiecoder

I was thinking I could import the posts and comments quite easily because they're both wordpress, and then do a wildcard redirect from one domain to the other (the archives format is ever so slightly different so there'd need to be a bit of regular expressions hackery but nothing too major). So none of the links would be lost or broken. Blog about it to explain perhaps. Maybe if I could work out some way of detecting when someone has come from the old domain I could display an explanation message or something.

Has anyone done anything like this before? Got any ideas about how it might be done better or anything I've missed? Does anyone think it's a terrible idea?

Hi goatlady,

there are two sides to this, the technical and the bloggy/business.

You have the technical covered as far as I can see. If you're using an older version of WP with Ultimate Tag Warrior then the tags may convert to categories - which means recategorising every post that you merge (I've done this myself - not much fun but I lived).

On the bloggy/business side - I'd suggest letting readers of both blogs know what is happening a few days prior, then make a big fuss of the revamped superblog - including writing an article on "merging blogs, my experience" or similar (as this has got to come up in google searches - it helps to allow for serendipitous discovery).

Good luck with it

Best regards, Andrew

[Lani]

On the tags issue, I think someone made a plugin to handle importing posts with UTW tags for the native tagging in 2.3.  I haven't used it, because I only found after having updated all my tags manually as well.  That was a pain.

[goatlady]

Thanks guys.

I actually don't think I've used tags much on zombiecoder, so that should be ok... I was letting Windows Live Writer embed them for me until I realised it was inserting invalid HTML (awesome program other than that, tho). And the categories are mostly similar, I think.

The idea only came to me last night, and after sleeping on it I am starting to ask "why didn't I think of this months ago?"

Blogging about it is definitely going to be on the cards!

[Lani]

The only other thing I can think of, and you have way more tech knowledge than me, is how it's going to show up in your feed.  If you're blogging about it that might not be an issue, but will your feed be flooded with the imported posts?  If most of your readers are reading both blogs that might be annoying and you might want to switch it off somehow and then refresh it.  If that's possible.  I have no idea what I'm talking about.

I do know, however, that when I get heaps of updated versions of posts I've already read where just a simple typo has been changed it's quite tedious.

[goatlady]

Ahhhh... good one Lani, I hadn't thought of that. That *would* be annoying.

Hmmm... yeah I will have to experiment with that on a test feed I think.

[Simone]

Ah, great idea Kay!

mmm, yeah, the feeds. Might be a bit annoying, but still worth it I'd think...
I don't get how rss/feeds work at all, and have often wondered if there's anyway of turning them off!

[goatlady]

well, technically I think my feed should only display the last 10 posts by date. That's what I need to test - whether adding backdated posts will change that. I'm sure someone's written something about it sometime

Of course, this means I have a spare blog space - and I have a great idea for a group blog with a couple of my mates too...